Every month Stereophile magazine offers authoritative reviews, informed recommendations, helpful advice, and controversial opinions, all stemming from the revolutionary idea that audio components should be judged on how they reproduce music.
I’m at Dan D’Agostino’s house listening to his triamped Apogee full-range ribbon speakers. It’s 1985. His listening room is immense, easily 30' by 45', and we’re rocking out to Led Zeppelin and Bonzo Dog Band records. The sound is light-years better than anything I’ve heard—dynamic as hell, beyond vivid, and the soundstage has infinite depth—and Dan’s obviously loving that I’m blown away by his system. We get to talking. He has three pairs of Krell KMA-160 monoblocks and Reference KRS preamps for me. Thanks, I say, but how can I get them home? No problem—Dan has a van. We gingerly put the Krells on dollies and roll them, sliding, bumping, and grinding, down his long gravel driveway to a shiny black Dodge van. The second we open the van’s rear…
TAKE HEED! Unless marked otherwise, all letters to the magazine and its writers are assumed to be for possible publication. In the spirit of vigorous debate implied by the First Amendment, and unless we are requested not to, we publish correspondents’ e-mail addresses. The ultimate test Editor: On the subject of comparisons, I would like to add just one word about the subjective vs objective approaches to listening to music. When my wife says to me, “Fred, you’re the best lover ever,” I don’t respond, “Have you done a double-blind test?” —Fred Parmenter Medfield, MA Music lovers Editor: Re: “Lovers of music” (“Letters,” September 2016, p.11), Mr. Jackson’s conclusion is philosophical: “The music is the thing . . .” I agree; the music is the thing that gets me going,…
SUBMISSIONS: Those promoting audio-related seminars, shows, and meetings should e-mail the when, where, and who to JAtkinson@enthusiastnetwork.com at least eight weeks before the month of the event. The deadline for the December 2016 issue is September 20, 2016. US: NEW YORK CITY Wes Phillips, who was Stereophile’s deputy editor from 1995 to 1999 and a valued contributor from 2000 to 2011, passed away Saturday, August 27, after several years of chronic ill health. He was 63. Wes is survived by his wife, Joan. After moving from Charlottesville, Virginia, where he grew up, to New York, Wes had a varied career in audio and music, working for Manhattan retailers Stereo Exchange, Innovative Audio, and Tower Records, and for record company Musical Heritage Society. Before he joined Stereophile’s full-time staff—I vividly remember…
Do good things come in small packages, or is bigger better? Your call. But regarding the products they’ve sent my way for review this month, designers Franc Kuzma, Kiyoaki Imai, and Velissarios Georgiadis are all in the latter camp. Kuzma’s Stabi M, designed to accommodate the 14" version of his 4Point tonearm, is a massive turntable with a big footprint. Imai’s Audio Tekne TEA-8695 tubed phono preamplifier has 11 Permalloy core transformers and weighs nearly 100 lbs. And although it uses just four signal-path tubes and a pair of rectifier tubes, Georgiadis’s Xactive Argo phono preamplifier fills the full width, height, and depth of a Harmonic Resolution System shelf—and not because it’s a big but mostly empty housing. KUZMA STABI M TURNTABLE AND 4POINT 14 INCH TONEARM DEEPER INTO DARKNESS:…
Last spring, when I was listening to Bowers & Wilkins’s 802 D3 Diamond loudspeakers, 1 Classé Audio offered a pair of their new Sigma Mono amps for the review. They claimed a synergy—B&W’s D3 series had been developed using Classé amps. I declined, only because using unfamiliar amplifiers would add to my assessment an uncontrolled variable. Now that the B&Ws have settled in—three 802 D3 Diamonds across the front, two 800 Diamonds at the back— it seemed time to hear what they could do when driven by the Classés. Unlike most other recent class-D amplifiers, the Sigma Mono ($8000/pair) is not based on an OEM module made by Hypex, Bang & Olufsen, or anyone else. The entire circuit was developed in-house by Classé and, in addition to the Mono, is…
MILES DAVIS AND JIMI HENDRIX. Clifford Brown and Louis Armstrong. Endless crates of Coltrane playing live that no one’s ever heard on record. Yes, they’re all a dream—but plenty of other unreleased gems, much of it from live tapes made in the 1950s and ’60s, are out there waiting to be discovered. And devoured. From the simple tape traders of the ’70s, to the secretive, drug-den–like bootleg CD stores and websites of the ’90s, to today’s ubiquitous digital downloads, once a certain type of music fan has listened to everything that’s been legally released, they migrate toward anything else that’s out there. And much of that is live performances recorded by record labels, radio stations, or, in an astonishing number of cases, rank amateurs. Ultimately, what draws them is that…
